As I’ve mentioned before, I love a good epistolary novel, and here’s one, slender and new, that I hope you’ll love too.

It’s no secret that Carlene Bauer takes as her models for her correspondents Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell; in fact, several reviewers have complained that those (real) voices have not been satisfactorily mimicked, or that Ms. Bauer ought to have worked with material of her own devising.

I confess that I am unmoved by both these objections. It may be heretical to say it, as someone who attended BU and sat in the Lowell room from time to time, but confessional is not my favored poetic brand, and I have been derelict in my scholarly duty to thoroughly read O’Connor (though what I have read is sublime). And why shouldn’t writers dip into the past or borrow historical figures, in whole or in part, as they tell their own stories? [That said, I think the voices of the wholly imagined characters — Claire and Ted — come through very strongly.]

So. I loved this book for its earnest but unwearisome approach to matters of faith, writing, love, and family, which, as you might suppose, are all connected. But humor, so often lost in conversations about weighty subjects (an understatement, I know), is wry and sly and happening all the time in this novel. Here’s my favorite zinger: “The Beats are really nothing more than a troop of malevolent Boy Scouts trying to earn badges for cultural arson” (14).

[Sidebar: I will be stealing one of Frances’s lines for my Christmas/Hannukah cards this year: “Love and joy come to you, and to your wassail too” (9). I know it’s too early to be thinking about Christmas, and yet: look at me go!]

I loved the way Frances and Bernard proceed almost immediately into matters of import, which I’ve found can happen when one starts a correspondence with someone not well known and not likely to be seen again, even if that’s something one would like. As I read the novel, I thought about my own treasured friendships, and resolved to write more letters.

[I’m rather terrible at keeping up with correspondence, though; do you have any tips for becoming a reliable letter-writer?]